King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts. Claudia Gold
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as possible, we may only speculate.113 By Ascension Day, 29 May 1147, Henry was back in Normandy.
For Henry, the moment marked the passing of the first chapter of his life. It was the last time he would see the uncle who had not only been responsible for shaping so much of his education but who had also made his and Matilda’s cause in England possible. Robert of Gloucester died on 31 October at Bristol. He was buried in the Benedictine priory church of St James, which he had founded.
Matilda left England less than four months after her brother’s death, in mid-February 1148, defeated and exhausted. Gervase of Canterbury wrote that she was ‘worn down by the trials of the English hostilities … preferring to retire to the haven of her husband’s protection than endure so many troubles in England’. She may have stomached the pitiful stalemate for so long because she was waiting for Henry to come of age. And it is possible that she felt unable to continue her cause without the leadership that her half-brother had provided. Robert’s son and heir, William, was not up to taking his father’s place; he was judged ‘effeminate and a lover of bedchambers more than of war’.114 Matilda made her home at Le Pré, near Rouen. She would never return to England.
Matilda was once again cast as a failure. Her biographer Marjorie Chibnall calls her ‘almost a queen’.115 But Matilda’s mission was doomed from the start. She was castigated for her character, her fiery temper – she ‘drove [her enemies] from her presence in fury after insulting and threatening them’ – and for her lack of femininity: ‘The countess of Anjou … was always above feminine softness and had a mind steeled and unbroken in adversity.’116 She was a ‘virago’, who ‘put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex’.117
For not even clever, ambitious, determined Matilda could overcome the ‘problem’ of her sex. Her father had foreseen the difficulties of his magnates accepting female rule, which is why he had induced them to swear their oaths to her three times. The very few women who did rule independently were encouraged to disregard their femininity altogether and to behave as kings. When Geoffrey’s father Fulk died in Jerusalem in 1143, the powerful Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux urged his widow Queen Melisende to ‘show the man in the woman; order all things … so that those who see you will judge your works to be those of a king rather than a queen’.118 Urraca of the Spanish kingdom of León and Castile pretended to be a man, signing her documents as a king rather than a queen.
Matilda’s hopes would now rest in Henry, her heir. As the coming man and despite his youth, Henry was already attracting support in England to add to those nobles who had staunchly championed the Angevin cause. This allegiance was motivated at least in part by economic interests. As soon as Geoffrey was recognised as duke of Normandy by Louis VII in 1145, it was clear to those magnates who held land on both sides of the Channel that Stephen would never reunite Normandy and England. But once Stephen died, should they offer their allegiance to Henry, and not Eustace, the problem would be solved.
Geoffrey always contended that he conquered Normandy on behalf of his son. His charters, after becoming duke, often read ‘with the advice and consent of Henry my son’.119 The intention was that there should be no impediment to Henry inheriting Normandy. Gilbert Foliot, when consecrated bishop of Hereford in September 1148, swore allegiance to Henry, and not to Stephen. And in mid-1148 William of Gloucester swore to aid Roger of Hereford against all men ‘saving the person of their lord Henry’.120 At this stage, it was more to do with Henry’s lineage, as the grandson of Henry I and the descendant of the Norman conquerors and the Anglo-Saxon kings, than his abilities. That was all about to change.
In October 1148, Henry’s immediate family – Matilda, Geoffrey, and his two younger brothers – met at Rouen to decide their strategy. Normandy was theirs, won both by diplomacy and by military action, and they had a good shot at England. To claim his entire birthright, Henry would return to England where his uncle, David King of Scots, would knight him. The knighting ceremony, very important as a passage to power, would mark the beginning of Henry’s manhood. And as he turned sixteen, it was an apt time to hold the ceremony. On Whit Sunday 1149, David knighted his nephew with the belt and garter in a magnificent ceremony at Carlisle Castle, followed by a lavish party. Henry now began to call himself ‘duke’; the bishop of Lisieux wrote to his friend Robert, bishop of Lincoln, to ‘favour as much as you can the cause of our duke.’121
Many of Matilda’s staunchest supporters – Miles of Gloucester, Brian Fitz Count, her brother Robert – were either dead or retired. With Henry’s return, a new body of men began to coalesce around the freshly anointed scion of Anjou and Normandy. These men included his uncle Reginald of Cornwall, who remained true to his sister’s cause; Robert Fitz Harding of Bristol; Ranulf earl of Chester, married to Robert’s daughter but whose allegiance throughout the past ten years had been in flux; Ranulf’s brother the earl of Lincoln; and the earl of Hereford. Henry was their acknowledged leader – not so much for his qualities, but more as a result of their bitter experience that Stephen could be duplicitous and capricious. Stephen, after Matilda left for Normandy, had courted the earls of Chester and Essex with lands; he had then, without warning or cause, imprisoned them.122 These Anglo-Norman magnates yearned for stability, and they looked to the as yet unproven Henry to provide it.
But just as in the previous generation when William Atheling’s greatest foe had been his first cousin William Clito, so Henry’s biggest danger lay with his cousin Eustace, Stephen’s eldest son. Eustace was as determined to be king of England as Henry was. He had paid homage to Louis for Normandy in 1137, and had been married to Louis’ sister, Constance, as putative heir to England and Normandy. He was knighted a year or so before Henry, at the end of 1147.
Stephen, fearing Henry’s growing importance, and to ensure his son’s succession, appealed to Rome to have Eustace crowned alongside him. But Pope Eugenius III refused. Stephen was anointed king before Rome could approve it. If the pope had given his tacit support to an anointed King Stephen (made holy by the anointing ceremony) over Matilda, that support would not necessarily be extended to Eustace. Even the anonymous author of the Gesta Stephani, until now firmly in the king’s camp, switched sides and proclaimed Henry over Stephen as the coming man, calling him ‘the right heir of England’.123
Henry made his way south from Carlisle, possibly bound directly for Normandy, possibly intending to fight Stephen and Eustace. But whatever Henry’s intentions, Stephen and Eustace were determined to obliterate him. Henry at sixteen – knighted and head of the Angevin party – was a far greater threat than the fourteen-year-old boy who had sailed to England to help his mother. The chronicler John of Hexham captured the spirit of exactly what was at stake: ‘There was between [Henry] and Eustace … a contest of arms, for they were rivals for the same crown.’124 It would be a fight to death.
Henry evaded capture, taking back roads to Bristol, despite Eustace’s dogged quest. The Gesta Stephani recorded the devastation of Eustace’s campaign: ‘They took and plundered everything they came upon, set fire to houses and churches, and, what was more cruel and inhuman to behold, fired the crops which had been reaped and stoked all over the fields, and consumed or destroyed everything edible they found.’125 This bitter civil war had terrible consequences for ordinary men and women, particularly those who lived in the path of battles. The period was peppered with crop failure, famine, wanton destruction, crime and disorder.
Atrocities were committed on both sides; when Matilda’s ally Miles of Gloucester sacked Worcester in 1139, he burned the city; his army (made up of domestic forces,